Michael Geist - Swartz's Death Places Spotlight on More Open Access To Information

"The Internet community has been reeling for the past week as it grapples with the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a prominent digital rights activist who left a remarkable legacy for a 26-year old. Swartz's contributions are used by millions of people every day as he played a key role in developing the specifications for RSS (which makes it easy to syndicate online content), Creative Commons licences (which makes is easy to make creative works freely available), and the popular website Reddit. My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes that while much of the immediate focus has centered on mental health issues, draconian computer crime laws, and the bewildering prosecution of Swartz for downloading millions of academic articles - a U.S. prosecutor was seeking as much as 35 years in jail despite the fact that Swartz did not benefit from the downloads and the source of the articles did not want to pursue legal action - the more notable legacy was his effort to make information more openly and freely available. Swartz aggressively pursued initiatives to increase the availability of information, particularly scientific and legal documents. His efforts were controversial, yet they point to mounting expectations that public information (or information funded by the public) be made easily accessible. In recent months, there have been some important developments in Canada in furthering Swartz's vision.  The Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the federal government's health research funding agency, recently launched a new open access policy that requires funded researchers to make their peer-reviewed publications freely available within 12 months of publication.  Open availability of legal materials is also fast becoming the standard in Canada. The Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII), which is Canada's leading source of free legal materials, now houses more than one million court judgments as well as tens of thousands of legislative documents from all Canadian provincial, territorial and federal jurisdictions. Canadian lawyers, who pay an annual fee to maintain the site as part of their dues, provide the financial support to ensure that CanLII is sustainable (I am a CanLII board member).  After years of limited progress, digitization efforts in Canada are also beginning to bear fruit.  The Internet Archive Canada, which has teamed with academic libraries across Canada, recently announced that it has digitized over 400,000 texts in Canada... The question facing many Canadian institutions is what comes next..."